“Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.”

Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.

I have one abiding religion-human liberty.

We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.

I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.

Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.

My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.

The media owes the responsibility to constantly tell the public the truth.

There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?

I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.

I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.

The man dies in all those that keep silent.

Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends.

The hero and the coward both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts his fear and converts it into fire.

The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.

Goals convert vision into ENERGY.

Believe in your dreams, convert them into action.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Once you believe in yourself and see your soul as divine and precious, you’ll automatically be converted to a being who can create miracles.

Convert bad news to good news.